QS World University Rankings: excellent results for the Politecnico

12 September 2017

A good result for the Politecnico di Torino in the new QS World University Rankings, published today in London by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS): the position in the world rankings remains substantially stable, with the University in 307th place, while Italy is in 7th place. From 2012 to date, the University has gained nearly 100 positions and is in the limited circle (approx. 1% of the total) of the world's universities at the top of the ranking, which analyses over 26,000 universities worldwide.

Another result of great importance, therefore, following the excellent performance of the ranking by subject by area published last March by QS, in which the Politecnico is ranked 52nd in the world for the Engineering macro area and among the 50 best universities in the world in Architecture and Civil and Structural Engineering.

The areas in which the University has improved its performance in this new overall ranking are the overall reputation in the academic field and among employers, two evaluation parameters in which the Politecnico reaches ratings well above the average, as well as in the research impact in the scientific community, which research takes into account by calculating the ratio between the number of citations and the number of faculty members.

In Italy, the Politecnico acquires three third places: the aforementioned reputation among employers and the ratio between the number of citations and the number of faculty members, plus the number of foreign students.

The high number of students per faculty member and the low presence of foreign faculty members, on the other hand, remain critical factors which have penalised the Politecnico in the general ranking: on both fronts, the University is trying to improve its performance with a large investment in human resources to ensure an even higher quality of its training offer.

“We are pleased with these results, which demonstrate how our University's reputation has further improved both in the academic field as well as among the international network of enterprises and companies, with unquestionable benefits for employment opportunities for our graduates”, underlines the Rector, Marco Gilli, who continues: “The courageous policies that we have implemented in terms of human resources will enable us to significantly increase the number of faculty members which, together with researchers on fixed-term contracts, will reach 1000 by 2018, and the call for external professors that has just ended will allow us to recruit a significant number of professors from foreign institutions, thus also improving in areas where we are structurally weaker. In an increasingly competitive context, an improvement in the ranking is a good sign, but we are aware that some structural problems in the Italian university system, such as the high number of students per faculty member and the low number of graduates cannot be overcome without a significant increase in investment in research and higher education” .